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+I WILL PUT MY SPIRIT IN YOU THAT YOU MAY LIVE — 5th
Sunday of Lent, March 9, 2008
These words from the prophet Ezekiel present us with the theme of today’s
readings. The gift of God’s Spirit gives us new life, a life that never yields
to death. Two weeks ago we heard the gospel of John tell us of the Samaritan
woman and Jesus inviting her to ask for living water. Last week we heard of the
man born blind and Jesus telling him to go and wash his eyes in the waters of
Siloe that h might see. Today he raises Lazarus from the dead, telling his
sisters Martha and Mary that everyone who lives and believes in him will never
die. Belief in Jesus, a belief that allows Christ into the center of our
consciousness, makes us sharers in eternal life.
The evangelist John has a wonderful way of speaking to us on many levels
simultaneously. The Church is using this narrative today both to prepare us for
the week to come but also to ground us in the great mystery that unfolds at the
very center of our lives. When Thomas, called the Didymus, says to his fellow
disciples: ‘Let us also go to die with him,’ we are pointed toward the sad
events about to happen in Jesus’ life but also to look at what is transpiring or
unfolding within the context of our very community, family and personal lives.
The mystery of his death and rising happens every moment of our Christian
existence, like the pattern of nights and days we continually experience. "If
Christ is in you," Paul tells us, "although the body is dead because of sin, the
spirit is alive because of righteousness." The experience of death and life is
the very texture of human life, above all of our spiritual growth.
To pass from death to life, to truly believe in Jesus so that he is for us even
now "the resurrection and the life," we are to live from the Spirit dwelling
within us. As the Carroll Stuhlmueller has said, the "resurrection is not so
much a theological problem as it is a religious experience. It is not an
extravagant miracle happening out there; it means the transforming presence of
Jesus within us. The resurrection is not completed when our dead bodies are
raised to life but instead when the spirit of Jesus dwells within us, yet, not
simply within each of us individually but within all of us as a family, [as a
community]."
Real faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus is letting his spirit to
become ever more present. The raising of Lazarus is what’s taking place every
time we die to self. The sisters sending word to Jesus, telling him that the one
he loves is ill is about you and me. Oftener than not Jesus does exactly with us
as he did with Lazarus, he stays away a few days, maybe weeks or months at a
time, that we may come to see the glory of God. Jesus knows the depths of our
own struggles far better than we. How often our own plans are destroyed.
All those wonderful possibilities of attainment, power, prestige, wealth and
influence or personal satisfaction seem collapse and all that is left is the
dead body of Lazarus in a tomb. Our carefully chartered plans are undone and all
that Jesus seems to do is stay away from the scene. I may myself be saying: "Who
is this Christ whom I thought all powerful and loving?" So often it only then
that our hearts are opened to those gently spoken words to Martha: "whoever
believes in me, even if he dies, will live." Jesus staying away is all about our
coming to know the glory of God. He weeps with us, weeps within us, perhaps,
more than we will ever know. Having experienced the garden of Gethsemani he
knows, all too well the fear that can take hold of any of us.
When he says at this altar through the priest, this is my Body, this is my
Blood, He is speaking from the center of this community, saying these words on
behalf of each one of us. He is inviting us to become living members of his own
Body, sharers in his own life-giving Blood as often as often as we open
ourselves to the power of his Spirit.
There is nothing God so wants for us, nothing that Jesus wants more to impart
than his own Spirit within us. Through the Eucharist says St Bernard, "just as
the bread enters our body, so our Lord enters us, in order to dwell in our
hearts through faith." Through faith, his Spirit becomes one with ours. When so
we are assured we will never die.
Yesterday we heard the wonderful story of the person who went to a holy one in
order to have the eyes of his heart opened. He was finally told by the holy one
that in order to see God he needed only to truly be where he was and not
somewhere else in mind or heart. Let me suggest that in today’s gospel, Jesus
teaches us precisely how to be where we are when he asks the blind men if they
believe that he can heal them.
It is faith that allows us to fully accept ourselves for who we
are in all our weakness, in our own blindness. It is faith that allows us to see
that we are loved for who we truly are so that there is no need to be somewhere
else, no need to be someone else, no need to meet someone else’s expectations.
And is it not faith that opens our eyes to Him who is even now standing before
each one of us and to recognize His presence not only here in the Eucharist but
in every moment of our lives. Is He not even now saying to us as he said to the
blind men who were following him: “Let it be done for you according to your
faith.”
Michael Casagram, OCSO
Abbey of Gethsemani
9 March 2008
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